“For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age” by Jessica Roda
This could be a tough review for me to write. First, I’m not a woman, so how do I review a book titled “For Women and Girls Only”? Second, I grew up and work at an egalitarian Conservative synagogue where women and men sing together in a choir, and I am their choir director. This book centers around the concept of “kol isha” which prohibits men from hearing female voices singing. This concept is foreign to me since women sing in front of men all the time in our congregation. Third, I’m not a professor. The author, Postdoctoral Fellow Jessica Roda, wrote her book in a style intended for her peers in academia who could understand her vocabulary and analyze her research.
Yet, even with my acknowledged limitations, I felt very motivated to read this book and write the review. Over 20 years ago, I sang at a Yom Hazikaron ceremony at Cedar Village. It was attended by rabbis of different denominations, including Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. The Orthodox rabbis objected to the Yavneh (now Rockwern Academy) children’s choir singing because girls were part of the choir. Back then, I didn’t understand why they objected. All I could think of was how bad I felt for the Yavneh kids who wouldn’t get to sing. I wasn’t familiar with the concept of “kol isha” which prohibits men from hearing female voices singing, and I didn’t understand it. My knowledge and understanding of Jewish practices and customs were shaped through the lens of what I could see growing up. Before reading this book, the only thing I knew about the ultra-orthodox world was what I saw on TV shows like “Shtisel” and the Netflix series “Unorthodox.” As I learned from reading, shows like these feed into stereotypes. Reading this book was a great way for me to leave my familiar synagogue in Cincinnati and jump into Professor Roda’s six years of research as she embedded herself in the ultra-orthodox communities of Outremont in Quebec, Williamsburg in Brooklyn and other places online.
Women in this book set up their own spaces on the internet where they could express themselves. By labeling their art “for women and girls only” the women put the onus on the men to stay away and not listen. In these spaces, they could share their music, dance and other methods of artistic expression without having to worry if men might hear them.
The forced isolation of COVID brought about an explosion of creativity online for the women in ultra-orthodox communities. Women set up home studios to produce their music, and they shared them with other women on social media. Online concerts drew huge audiences of over 100,000 viewers. The market for “frum” women performers grew exponentially. The author coined her own term, “cyberfrumenism” as a play on the term cyberfeminism to point out how ultra-orthodox observant women empowered themselves by appropriating and taking control of internet technologies to transform Orthodoxy. The book included a photo of an advertisement for a concert. Hardly visible was a small warning label at the top that said “for women and girls only.” I loved that the label was so small. The women fulfilled their obligation of providing the warning label, but it’s up to the men to see it. As the author stated, her book isn’t about the men, it’s about the women.
The Orthodox rules of “tsnius” (modesty) presented additional challenges for the women who wanted to build an audience. To keep the rules of tsnius (pronounced TZNEE-yiss), women are not allowed to bring attention to themselves by using their names or showing their faces in advertisements. The online concerts focused on the group and the community more than the individual. Don’t expect to hear someone belt out a “Defying Gravity” solo. Most of the women in the book were taught to hold back their solo voices. They sang stronger when they came together as a group. It was common for girls to sing and dance together in summer camps and charity events growing up. It was less common for married women to continue their art unless it was a way for them to make a living. Many of the married women worked to provide income during the period when their husbands studied fulltime at the Kollel or Yeshivah. I found it interesting that the rules of tsnius could be adjusted for the right reasons. For example, the same dance movements that a rabbi might say were immodest were just fine as long as you were dancing for fitness or health reasons.
Professor Roda organized the women in her study into different categories. Some left the ultra-orthodox community, which she called OTD (off the derech). They pushed the boundaries of tsnius rules, but they still dressed modestly enough so they wouldn’t lose their audience. She came up with four main categories: private, modest-public, counter-public and public as ways to classify the differences in how the women expressed their art online. She included a four-page chart listing women artists in the Orthodox communities illustrating their backgrounds and online categories. Their backgrounds included Litvish, Hasidic, Chabad, Modern Orthodox and Secular.
In her chapter “The Public Artist,” we meet Melissa and Malky. They both worked as actors and consultants on projects, such as the Netflix limited series “Unorthodox.” Even though they were able to help provide some authenticity to these productions, they were frustrated with the stereotypes portrayed. Melissa said, “Growing up in a large family, there is so much noise and life, it is not just the serious things you see. People who live in New York often think of Hasidic women as meek, and I think there is so much passion we don’t get to see as much. There is joy, love, fighting, music, songs, dance; there is life, and that is the part that exists in the community.” I wanted to hear even more about the parts of the women’s lives that Melissa described.
Professor Roda is a brilliant person who speaks six languages. Reading through the first forty pages was a challenge since I’m not a grad student or PhD., and I don’t have her vocabulary. I am mostly an autodidact. What is an autodidact? That’s one of the words Professor Roda used, and it means self-taught. I joked to my wife that I had an easier time reading a book on quantum physics than I did the first part of this book. But to be fair, the book on quantum physics was written by Dr. Sean Carroll who often writes for the general public. Professor Roda’s book was written for an academic audience. This was the first scientific ethnography that I had read. As a writer, I appreciated getting to increase my vocabulary by looking up new words such as diachronic and synchronic. Once the author moved past the preliminaries and got to the chapters with the women in the study, it was a much easier read.
Another new word for me was “contrafactum” which is a song where you replace the lyrics with your own. The women would take songs made popular by Jewish male artists and write their own lyrics to them. They often sang in Yiddish or Yinglish, which is a combination of English and Yiddish. This would be a great book for a college-level Jewish studies or women’s studies course. It would be fantastic for a social media class illustrating how the women successfully built their vibrant online community. It is also a motivational story about empowerment that could help the reader build their confidence and agency. I am glad I read it, and it left me wanting to learn even more about the parts of Judaism that I never experienced.
